"The game is 100% finished," he wrote. "The company is not out of money. The project was completed on time, on budget and will be shipped this month (Jan 2013.) It has been in Closed Beta with 25k people having run through it since late last year."
McGee also addressed the line "we're out of time and money to do so," which has since been removed from their Kickstarter.
"When the Akaneiro team says they are 'out of money/time' it just means they came to the natural end of their development cycle on that project," McGee told me. "The KS campaign would allow them to extend that—something we'd ask a publisher to consider were we funded that way. We're not, so we ask the audience instead."
I asked McGee to clarify this: if the game is 100% finished, why does the Kickstarter say that the team feels "some key features are missing"? Why start a Kickstarter at all?
"'What's been achieved both artistically and mechanically is fantastic… but it's just not enough to call the game complete, to satisfy our fans or ourselves,'" McGee wrote, citing his Kickstarter page. "THIS is the main idea. We're not satisfied. We'd like to take the game further and make it better. In the days when we were funded by a publisher, we would have asked them to review our ideas for additional features and approve (or not) a longer development cycle. 99% of the time they would have said 'no.'"

For some reason, his name is very familiar to me even though looking at his wiki bio it seems I've never played any game he was involved with except when he was a level designer at id software, and I'm pretty sure I'd never heard of him back then. Methinks articles like this one might be the reason why.